Apple’s shipments of mobile PCs, including iPads, totaled 23.4 million units in 4Q11 and more than 62.8 million for 2011, giving the company the top spot worldwide. Nearly 80 percent of those units were iPads. The data comes from the latest NPD DisplaySearch Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report, which was released on Thursday.

Major browser makers will be adding “Do Not Track” buttons to their software this year, except Apple, which is “not engaged” in the endeavor right now, Stuart Ingis, Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) counsel, told Mashable. Mr. Ingis noted that the DAA “is holding the door open” for Apple’s later involvement.

An Apple patent filed in August 2010 and published recently, called “Single Support Lever Keyboard Mechanism,” describes various ways to make a keyboard thinner without sacrificing stability and aesthetics. In particular, this would obviously allow the company to make thinner laptops.

Apple co-founder Ron Wayne has spoken before about his brief 12-day tenure with the company, at the end of which he cashed out and moved on, denying himself an opportunity to become a multi-millionaire just a few years later. He has never expressed regrets about the decision, and on Wednesday, he posted an essay about the experience on his Facebook fan page, calling the fortune he missed out on “character building.”

On Monday, an ABC News Nightline special report focused on the conditions at the Foxconn factory that makes Apple’s iPhone and iPad, along with products from other electronics companies. It was the first time Apple had allowed a journalist to see its production line and report on it. After the report aired, Apple, Foxconn, and the Fair Labor Association responded to specific points raised during the story.

T-Mobile USA on Wednesday reported US$4.57 billion in revenue during 4Q11, down from $4.69 billion in 4Q10 as it shed 526,000 net customers. “Not carrying the iPhone led to a significant increase in contract deactivations in the fourth quarter of 2011,” company CEO Philipp Humm said in a press release. T-Mobile’s net customer losses were 23,000 in the year-ago quarter.

Realmac Software on Wednesday released Clear, a list and to-do app that uses a color-coded heat map to show the most important tasks, with a variety of multi-touch gestures used to work with those items.

Eastman Kodak Co. may be in the midst of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding, but that hasn’t stopped Apple from asking a bankruptcy judge for permission to file a patent infringement claim against the photography pioneer. Apple says the patents are involved in Kodak’s digital cameras, digital picture frames, and printers.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, Apple sold 35.5 million iPhones, good for 23.8 percent of the worldwide market and surpassing Samsung’s 34 million smartphones sold, according to a report issued by Gartner on Wednesday. Apple’s share was 15.8 percent in 4Q10. The company is now the third-largest cell phone vendor in the world.

Earlier this week, Proview Technology successfully sought the removal of Apple’s iPad from retail stores in one Chinese city because it says it owns the trademark on the product name in that country. Proview also sought to ban all iPad shipments into and out of the country, which would hobble Apple’s global sales since the device is manufactured in China, but Chinese customs officials have indicated that they’re unlikely to get involved.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has informed AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint that they must allow shareholder requests for votes on resolutions supporting net neutrality, the concept of treating all Internet traffic equally. According to Bloomberg, the SEC has said that the issue has become a “significant policy consideration.”

Apple has significantly cut the minimum amount for an advertising campaign in its mobile iAd system to US$100,000. It was previously $500,000, an amount that was cut in half from the original cool $1 million needed to get into the game in 2010, when iAd was first unveiled.

The latest workplace trend is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), in which employees bring their own smartphone or tablet to work and use that to get their jobs done. That has produced mixed feelings among, however: 64 percent of IT managers surveyed by Absolute Software felt the BYOD trend was risky, according to a BBC News story.

The U.S. Department of Justice also approved another pair of key tech industry acquisitions on Monday: the purchase of Nortel and Novell patents by two consortiums of companies, with Apple heavily involved in both.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday gave its okay to Google’s US$12.5 billion Motorola Mobility acquisition, stating that the search engine giant is “unlikely to materially alter” Motorola’s competitive position, according to AppleInsider.

The rumor mill continues to churn ahead of Apple’s expected announcement of the next-generation iPad in March. On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that its sources said Apple is testing an iPad with a smaller screen and is looking to sell  a 4G-capable version through Verizon and AT&T.

Apple has reportedly forced manufacturer Pegatron to stop making Asustek’s Zenbook if it wants to keep its orders for iOS devices. Apple’s ultimatum stems from the Zenbook’s similarity to the MacBook Air, according to a 9to5 Mac article that cites a Chinese language piece.

Shares of Apple’s stock, which trade under AAPL on Nasdaq, broke the US$500 mark for the first time in the company’s history during Monday morning trading. A CNBC article noted that Apple is now halfway to a $1 trillion valuation, which will be the first ever.

Apple on Monday put out a press release in which it announced that “the Fair Labor Association [FLA] will conduct special voluntary audits of Apple’s final assembly suppliers, including Foxconn factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China, at Apple’s request. A team of labor rights experts led by FLA president Auret van Heerden began the first inspections Monday morning at the facility in Shenzhen known as Foxconn City.”

AT&T has said as far back as last June that it is working on offering shared data plans to its customers who want to pool their data among multiple users, but signs of its existence were scant until just recently, when a source sent Engadget a screenshot indicating that support for group data has been added to Telegence, the company’s internal system for managing customer accounts.

Late last week, Apple filed a motion in a U.S. court seeking a preliminary injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus smartphone, which runs Android OS 4.0. Florian Mueller, who has been closely following Apple’s litigation for many months, said on his blog that he expects a ruling on Apple’s filing “within a matter of months.”

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was given a posthumous Trustees Award at the 2012 Grammys. The award is given “to individuals who, during their careers in music, have made significant contributions, other than performance, to the field of recording.” Mr. Jobs was one of three Trustees Award recipients for 2012.

Apple’s ongoing legal matters continued on Friday with a pair of events: a German court struck down Samsung’s second patent complaint against Apple, and Apple has placed a “Communication to protect consumers” notice on its online Italian store in compliance with a court ruling that said the company was pushing AppleCare while neglecting to tell buyers about the two-year warranty that’s legally mandatory in Italy. Apple was fined 1.2 million euros as part of the court ruling in Italy.

Motorola Mobility said on Thursday that its 4Q11 ended in a loss of US$80 million. The company said it shipped 10.5 million mobile devices, including 5.3 million smartphones and just 200,000 tablets. In comparison, Apple this week said it shipped 15 million iPads and 37 million iPhones during 4Q11.

Nokia on Thursday said its 4Q11 earnings fell 73 percent from the prior year as its push to sell its new Lumia Windows Phone failed to help it compete in a new marketplace. According to Reuters, the Lumia phone has sold more than one million units since it launched last November.

Developer XVision on Friday released DONKEY.BAS at the iOS App Store. The retro game recreates a PC-DOS game co-created by Bill Gates in 1981 to show off what the Microsoft BASIC programming language could do. The .BAS file extension indicated that it was BASIC program, so while the game was called Donkey, it was more commonly known as DONKEY.BAS.

What to do with all that money? That’s the question facing Apple after it revealed its piggy bank was close to US$100 billion. CFO Peter Oppenheimer said the company is “actively discussing” how to use that money, which renewed the call for a dividend among many investors and analysts. Apple’s hoard exceeds the market value of all but 26 firms in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.

Research firm IHS, which now owns iSuppli, on Thursday said that Apple retook the number one spot in global smartphone shipments during 4Q11, thanks to the iPhone 4S, but Samsung grabbed the pole position for all of 2011.

Google this week announced that it will be placing 60 of its Web services under one umbrella privacy policy that will take effect March 1 and allow those services to share data between them. The change is mandatory, although Google Books, Google Wallet and Google Chrome are excluded. Responses to the changes have been mixed so far.

AT&T on Thursday announced its earnings for 4Q11, noting that it achieved its best-ever quarter for Android and iPhone activations, with 7.6 million iPhones activated out of the 9.4 million smartphones it sold. That helped drive the company’s sales 3.6 percent higher to US$32.5 billion.

A new patent published this week titled “Apparatus and Method to Facilitate Universal Remote Control” reveals a touchscreen-based universal remote that would operate a variety of devices, including computers, and promises to reduce the clutter found on many universal remotes sold today.

Research firm Strategy Analytics said this week that tablet shipments more than doubled in 4Q11, thanks to frenzied interest in the iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire, but noted that Apple lost 10 points of market share while Android gained 10.

Good Technology, whose products help IT departments secure mobile devices, this week released a report in which it said that the iPhone 4 and 4S “strongly dominated activations in the enterprise for Q4 2011. The mid-October release of the iPhone 4S caused smartphone activations to skyrocket month over month, while Android’s percentage of total smartphone activations remained steady.”

The Wednesday morning surge in Apple’s stock price, which hovered around the US$450 mark during the first few hours of trading, catapulted the company ahead of Exxon Mobil and into first place as the world’s most valuable company. The Wall Street Journal noted that the jump in AAPL shares put Apple’s market value at $416.7 billion, just ahead of Exxon Mobil’s $413 billion.

Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Walkley on Wednesday issued a new research note obtained by TMO. Mr. Walkley wrote: “We believe Apple is likely to announce a dividend during 2012, potentially next quarter when crossing $100B in cash and cash equivalents. We view this as very bullish for investors, as we believe a new group of investors seeking dividends would invest in Apple and drive shares higher.”

Smile on Wednesday announced iCloud support for its PDF editor PDFpen, which is also available now for iPad. iCloud support is automatically included in the new PDFpen 5.7 and PDFpenPro 5.7 released to the Mac App Store, and users who update to the new version directly via Smile can buy the US$0.99 app PDF Cloud Access at the Mac App Store to receive the new functionality.

UBS analyst Maynard Um on Wednesday issued a new research note in which he covered Apple’s Tuesday earnings announcement and significantly raised his expectations for the company’s 2Q12 fiscal quarter and 2012 fiscal year, given the blowout results reported for calendar 4Q11. He bumped FY2Q12 from US$33.7 billion in revenue and $8.54 EPS to $37.5 billion/$10.95 and boosted FY2012 from $142.7 billion/$35.83 to $161.2 billion/$46.09.

The “thermonuclear war” that Steve Jobs declared against Android may be getting bogged down in trench warfare that is rumored to have cost US$100 million or more, according to a source who spoke with Newsweek’s Dan Lyons.

Apple may be rumored to have a TV set in the works, but its Apple TV set-top box “is still classified as a hobby,” CEO Tim Cook said during the company’s Tuesday earnings call. Mr. Cook made that categorization based on the revenue generated by the 2.8 million units sold during Apple’s previous fiscal year, which concluded last September.

During Apple’s quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, company CFO Peter Oppenheimer revealed that Apple’s average revenue per retail store was US$17.1 million during the fourth quarter of 2011, up 43 percent from $12.1 million a year ago. Apple opened four new stores in the quarter, three in Europe and one in New York City’s Grand Central Station, for a total of 361 locations in the chain.

Bluewater Productions’ comic book version of Steve Jobs’ life hit shelves this week, and Reuters filed a video report covering the story. A New York City comic book shop owner is quoted as saying the artwork “is pretty basic for a comic,” but it offers many “iconic images” from his life.

Apple’s latest patent filing, which was filed in July 2010 and made public this week by the US Patent and Trademark Office, details a new iPhone interface concept in which the user relies on motion controls to interact with a 3D environment. However, this is not 3D in the sense of images springing off the screen; the patent filing refers to it as 3D images built with polygons.

Target has confirmed rumors from earlier this week that Apple will open stores-within-stores at 25 of its locations. The New York Times quoted a Target spokeswoman as saying the effort would involve “expanded displays” of Apple’s merchandise; she declined to elaborate on specifics.

Unruly Chinese shoppers forced Apple to cease sales of the iPhone 4S in Beijing and Shanghai on Friday, the first day of the new smartphone’s sales in the country. According to CNN, hundreds of people camped outside an Apple store in Beijing and became angry when it remained closed after its scheduled 7 AM opening time.

As speculation about an Apple TV set swirls through this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, Philip Newton, Samsung Australia’s director of audio-visual, said that ex-CEO Steve Jobs’ revelation about “the simplest [TV] user interface you can imagine” is “nothing new.” He was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald.

On the heels of Apple’s acquisition of Anobit, Seeking Alpha has taken a look at the tech giant’s growing cash hoard, which is impressive at US$82 billion but is hampered by the $54 billion that is held overseas and can’t be repatriated without a 35 percent tax hit.

Apple’s acquisition of Israeli firm Anobit Technologies, which produces controllers that optimize flash memory capabilities, was said to be US$390 million, according to a pair of Anobit shareholders who spoke to Bloomberg. That price was below what Anobit sought, which was said to be as much as $500 million, according to speculation in an Israeli newspaper last month.

Foxconn Technology on Thursday said it has resolved a dispute with 150 employees who launched a protest earlier this week that involved some of them threatening to commit suicide by jumping from the roof of a factory. Foxconn said most of the employees returned to work, with 45 of them resigning; a source cited by The New York Times said the workers were promised higher pay.

Samsung and LG have reportedly beaten out Sharp for the contract to supply iPad 3 LCD panels, according to a source who spoke with Korea IT News. Sharp competed as a supplier, but the source said it failed to pass Apple’s approval process.

Research firm ForeSee on Thursday announced the results of a new study in which it found that the mobile shopping experience on Apple’s web site was the most satisfying among 3,000 consumers who were asked about 16 e-retailers. Apple’s score was 85 out of 100, barely beating out Amazon’s 84 points. Dell, Netflix, and eBay rounded out the top five.